


Diamonds in the Moonlight

by objectlesson



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Exploration, F/F, First Time, Identity Issues, Rich Girl Harry, Slow Burn, Summer Romance, skater louis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 13:39:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14672217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: The 70s au where Harry is a rich girl stuck in the suburbs who thinks she loves Shaun Cassidy, and Louis is the skater who breaks into her backyard and changes everything forever.





	Diamonds in the Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> It's no secret I love the 70s...if you follow my blog, you know how much I adore the fashion and the TV and the deplorable interior design. I'd been wanting to do a 70s AU for awhile, and someone sent me a cute skater Louis prompt on tumblr, so it finally happened. 
> 
> This is part one of a two part story. I started writing it with the intention of it being a short one shot, but I fell in love with the characters and it ended up getting away from me into a long, slow, sweet, self indulgent summer piece. Know part two is coming eventually, it's about half-written.
> 
> Thank you so so so much to all the girls in my inbox and in my comments who tell me how much my girl direction fic means to them. Without all your support and enthusiasm, I likely would have never written more than a few short girl stories, but you've given me the confidence and drive to write longer pieces. They're so meaningful to me as a lesbian, so knowing they're meaningful to all of you, and that the careful explorations of my own feelings and experiences have benefitted you all as well as me, feels magical. I've never felt less alone in my writing, thank you. 
> 
> Special thanks to Chloe/Flower-crown-femme/Moz Direction for giving me so much encouragement on this fic, and to my amazing beta Jen, who was there to tell me when my 70s slang was a little too far out/less than radical, lol. I love you both.

_“I stand accused I'm in league with the forces of darkness_

_An incurable believer in the magic of the midnight sky_

_And the love that I found today_

_Oh I can't let it slip away_

_Oh darlin' can't you read between the lines “_

_—_ “Hey Deanie,” Shaun Cassidy

Harry is draped across the couch, blowing the same unruly curl off her forehead as she lazily, miserably flips through _Tiger Beat_ magazine. It’s about 200 million degrees in her grandparents’ house, and she feels like there’s absolutely nothing to do save for idly read about Shaun Cassidy’s dating “musts,” any sort of motion making her distractingly sweaty, limbs adhering together, nylon gym shorts itchy as they ride high on her thighs. She outgrew them last year, but no one is home and real pants are just too hot, so she can’t be bothered. She scratches her knee and skips over a few pages about Scott Baio because she doesn’t get why anyone thinks he’s cute. 

It’s then that she hears something in the backyard. A sinister rustling, like when intrepid raccoons jump from the roof to the trash cans in search of suburban snacks at midnight. It’s mid-afternoon, though, so it doesn’t make sense. No raccoon is _that_ intrepid. 

Then she hears a _voice_ , a _boy’s_ voice, rasping and and cautious over the words _coast’s clear,_ or something like that. 

_Burglars!_ Harry thinks in a panic, sitting up and tossing her magazine aside, tugging at her too-short shorts. Burglars can’t come to rob the house _now_ ;she isn’t wearing a bra, and no one else is home. Plus, she’s never _fought_ a criminal before, she’s hardly seventeen and only moderately athletic if you count playing tennis and riding horses as sports. Her experience with exciting things like this is limited to Nancy Drew books and _Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine_. She’s woefully inept. 

The burglars are chatting now, and she can hear their footsteps as they head toward her grandparents’ backyard. She holds her breath as she tiptoes to the kitchen to get a knife out of the wooden block on the counter like they do in horror movies before she carefully, carefully peers through the curtain of plastic slats keeping the sun from blaring in the sliding glass door. 

They’re pretty young for burglars, two men—boys— really, in backward baseball caps and oversized t-shirts with the sleeves cut out, so that she can see the one’s ribcage as he hops down from the fence. Then, she hears the distinct sound of wheels hitting cement, and a light goes off in her brain. 

They’re _skaters_ , not burglars. Or maybe they’re skate-burglars. Skateboards could just be their getaway method, helping them speed off with her grandfather’s golf clubs and her grandmother’s pearls and china (terribly unfair; Harry is supposed to inherit those pearls). Plus, Harry’s pretty sure that most boys who skate are also delinquents. She thinks she even saw a _tattoo_ on one of the perpetrators. 

She very bravely tightens her sweat-slippery grip around the knife’s handle and heaves open the sliding glass door with some difficulty (it always sticks). “What the hell do you jerks think you’re doing?!” she yells, the first time that she's ever said the words “jerk” or “hell” in the presence of strangers, let alone at this volume. It’s invigorating.

The two boys whip around to stare at her, and Harry _feels_ her stomach tighten up, her cheeks get hot. Because she was wrong. 

Only _one_ of the delinquent skate-burglars is a boy, like she originally thought. The other is a _girl._ Like her. Only with skinned knees showing beneath the hem of her long, loose shorts. With tawny hair bleached blonde at the tips where her ponytail pokes out from under the bill of her dirty cap. With light, twinkling eyes and high cheekbones stained in a summer flush. She looks like a pretty-boy, a _Tiger Beat_ dreamboat, and suddenly Harry can’t speak, let alone call anyone a _jerk._

 _“Shit,”_ the boy grits out, dropping his board and looking guilty as his eyes dart to the girl, who’s staring back at Harry, just as stunned and wide-eyed. “I thought you said the coast was clear.” 

“It was, the pool was _drained_ , I didn’t think—,” she stops herself before carefully holding out her hands, like she thinks Harry’s a horse who might spook. “Hey, we’re _really_ sorry, miss. We know how this must look, but please, please just, uh, set down the knife? We can explain and then leave and you’ll never have to see us ever again.” 

Harry, who had sort of forgotten that she was holding a knife in the first place, glances down at it, astounded. “Oops,” she says, stalling because she doesn’t actually want them to leave, because she _does_ want to see them again, weirdly enough, even though they’re _trespassing in her grandparents’ backyard_ , possibly to steal the pearls that she’s supposed to inherit. “Are you just…were you just going to skate? Or were you going to break in?” 

The boy, who’s very handsome in a chiseled, Omar Sharif sort of way, makes a face. “Break in where?” he asks, taking off his baseball cap and ruffling his shiny black hair. 

“Into the house, Zayn, the _house._ She thought we were going to steal something or kidnap her,” the girl snaps, rolling her eyes. “Which is what I would have thought, too, if I had heard someone in _my_ yard. It’s a paranoid girl thing that you wouldn’t understand because your parents didn't hammer it into you from day one that the world is out to hurt you. Right?” she asks, redirecting her attention to Harry and taking a tentative step closer. She’s wearing scuffed white Nikes, and Harry stares at them so that she won’t have to look into her eyes, which are Shaun Cassidy-sparkly-blue-or-green and squinty in the sun. They make Harry feel faint, and she’s already too hot. “We probably scared you. I’m really sorry.” 

“You did scare me,” Harry admits, though she’s less scared now. She’d still be wary if she were back here with two strange boys, but the mere presence of another girl helps soothe her worry. After all, this girl wouldn’t hang out with (and so easily fire insults at) this boy if he wasn’t her friend, if he wasn’t safe somehow, too. “Sorry I pulled a kitchen knife on you...that was probably a little much.” 

The girl laughs at that, a high, breathy sort of laugh, light and scraping all at once. Harry takes a deep breath and sets the knife on the frosted glass of the white-wire table next to the poolside lounge chairs with a clink. “So, I’m guessing that you wanted to skate in the pool?” she asks tentatively, like she knows the first thing about skating, like she’s practically an _expert._

“Louis and I skate around the burbs in the summer looking for yards where the pool is drained. It _usually_ means that the family is on vacation for a few months and aren’t home,” the boy, Zayn, explains, hopping onto his board and rolling around randomly as he talks, making the whole thing look absurdly easy. “But Louis made a bad call with this one. We’re sorry.” 

_Louis_ , Harry thinks, a little thrill in her chest; Louis and Zayn, skaters but probably not delinquents, her age or just a bit older, effortlessly _cool_ and in her boring backyard. She feels important, like she’s keeping a secret. 

“S’okay,” Harry says with fake nonchalance, sitting down on one of the pool chairs. It squeaks under her weight, the plastic hot against her thighs, but she doesn't want to be awkward and get up again so soon after sitting, so she just endures it, crossing her legs with a wince. “It’s just me that’s home right now. I’m staying with my grandma and grandpa for the summer, and they’re surprisingly active for old people, I mean, they’re _never_ home. S’probably why they drained the pool.” 

Zayn and Louis exchange a glance, making Harry wish that she was cool and worldly enough to decipher it, to understand all the complexity and nuance therein. “So they’re gone a lot? Not just today?” Zayn asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“Pretty much every weekday, my grandma goes into town for a jogging social, and she also has a wine-and-gossip buddy down the street. They get drunk on Fridays, so she sleeps there… she has more friends than I do?” Harry adds, feeling a bit embarrassed about how terrifically uneventful her summer has been. Nicky and Lee-Anne went to Hawaii and Barbados, respectively, for their summers, and Nyla is at a riding camp in Baltimore. Harry’s the only one stuck in a boring old retirement community in Orange County, even her _parents_ ditched her to go on a luxury couples cruise after renewing their vows. “And my grandpa is _always_ on golfing trips, so most days, it’s just me. Roasting in the house because the air conditioner is broken. They’ve had it since 1954 and brag about it constantly because it was one of the first installed in this neighborhood or something, but that doesn’t matter if it doesn’t _work.”_

“Drained pool _and_ a broken air conditioner? You need to find a way to cool off,” Louis jokes, sitting down across from Harry on the _same_ lounger, leaning in and looking at Harry with a quirky, crooked little smile that makes Harry’s stomach plummet. She feels like Louis is teasing her somehow, about _something_ , but she isn’t sure what. Is it really obvious that she’s all sweaty? That her shorts are too tiny? That she isn’t wearing a bra? 

Harry self-consciously crosses her arms over her chest and says, “I _know,_ I wish there was water in the pool.” 

“I don’t,” Louis quips, playing with the blonde bits of her ponytail. They seem like they’d be really soft. “Easier for us this way, I mean, assuming you don’t turn us in for trespassing.” She looks up at Harry then, with twinkly eyes that are definitely blue. Harry thinks about the September ‘77 issue of _Tiger Beat_ , how the cover is on the wall of her room back home, how pale Shaun’s irises look in it. 

“I’m not gonna turn you in,” Harry says dumbly, mouth suddenly dry. “I...you could come over during the day, if you wanted, actually. My grandparents won’t notice, and I could use the company,” she continues, even though she should _really_ stop, this is _not_ what her parents meant when they said, _don’t give Nana any trouble, Harriet, she drinks too much for anything shocking to happen._ But Harry is a teenage girl with no car or friends within biking distance, and Louis and Zayn—especially Louis—seem really cool. 

Zayn looks skeptical, but Louis’s face lights up, and apparently that’s all Harry cares about because she feels triumphant. “See?” Louis crows at Zayn, pulling her cap off her head and tossing it at him, ruffling up her ponytail in the process. The plastic strap left a little pink indent on her forehead, and Harry wants to put her thumb there, smooth it away. “I’m Lou, by the way,” Louis says, offering her hand (short blunt nails and scabs on her knuckles, like she was in a fight, maybe, or at least has taken very many falls). Harry shakes it, hot and itchy all over. A moment passes and Louis laughs, like Harry did something funny, adding, “And you are...? Or do you want us to call you ‘mysterious knife girl’? Zayn would love to call you that.” 

“Oh, god, sorry,” Harry mutters, putting her face in her hands, very aware that one of them touched Louis’s hand only moments before. She doesn't know why she’s being so weird, why she feels so _nervous._ It’s not like she’s uncool, like she’s never made a friend in her life. She’s fairly popular at school and knows how to be flirty and charming with boys so that they buy her ice cream sandwiches at the bowling alley, she's even let them kiss her once or twice. She’s doesn’t know why she’s tongue-tied right now. Maybe it's because she's been so isolated all summer that she forgot how to talk to other humans. Or maybe it’s because Louis is _so unlike_ all her other friends, so unlike all the girls she knows, with their matching winged eyeliner and fancy turntables for their disco records, their white gogo boots and daddy’s car keys. Harry has never met a girl like Louis before, not up close anyway, although she’s always admired any girl who doesn’t wear makeup or give a fuck about impressing boys. And Louis doesn't give _any_ fucks. She climbed Harry’s back wall like it was nothing. “I’m Harriet,” she finally declares, cheeks red. “But my friends call me Harry.” 

“Well,” Louis says carefully, cocking her head. “Are we friends?” 

“Yeah,” Harry replies after a moment, looking up, hoping her face isn’t so _obviously,_ obviously pink that Louis doesn’t buy her bravado. “Yeah, we can be friends.” 

“The real question is,” Zayn interjects, kicking his board up into his hand, “can we skate in your pool while the old folks are gone?” 

There’s a pause while Harry and Louis watch each other, sharing a private smile about something, though Harry isn’t sure about what, exactly. It passes, however, and the world rematerializes. 

“Sure,” Harry says then, flipping her hair, feeling like she's gone _insane,_ inviting these _skaters_ to stay at her grandparents’ _house._ “I can call you during the week, too, when they’re out,” she adds, because clearly she’s jumped off the deep end. Into the empty pool. Which would probably kill her. 

“You have a _phone?”_ Zayn asks, like that’s an unusual thing to have, and Louis is just _looking at her,_ smiling widely, lines scrunching at the tails of her eyes. 

“Yes,” Harry says defensively. “A princess phone.”

“Of course...a princess phone,” Louis chuckles. “Well, Harry, since we’re friends, go get me a pen, and I’ll write down my number.” 

Harry moves on numb legs back into the house, wondering what she’s done and finding herself not caring. She hears Louis whooping outside, the smack of skin against skin as she high-fives Zayn. “See, told you this neighborhood was perfect. Look at this place...our own private skate park.” 

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles, though his voice is too low to really make out. “That's not why you’re so excited, though, c’mon,” he might add. Harry can’t be sure, so she doesn’t wonder what he means. 

She comes out with a pen and a pair of round white sunglasses that she hasn’t had an excuse to wear all summer, covering her chest with one arm while Louis takes her other arm and scrawls out a phone number on her skin. 

—-

That night, Harry copies Louis’s number from her arm onto a piece of paper torn from her journal and doodles stars around it. Writes Louis’s name, dots the i with a heart, and then traces over the name again, so it's darker than anything else. 

Later, in the shower, she tries not to scrub off Louis’s handwriting, even though it technically doesn’t matter since she’s already written down the number for safekeeping. She hums the Bee Gees as she gets dressed, and when she comes down for dinner, she eats _all_ of her grandma’s meatloaf, which might be a first. 

“How was your day, Harriet? You certainly seem to be in a good mood...apply to any jobs? I hear the dentist in town is hiring a receptionist,” Nana tells her, gesturing with her fork. 

“It was fine…great, actually,” Harry replies, chewing reheated frozen peas and swallowing without even making a face. “I met some friends, maybe.” 

“Oh! Boys?” Nana asks, trying to curb her obvious excitement. 

“Sort of…,” Harry says before correcting herself. “Yes, boys.” She isn’t sure why she’s lying, save for the fact that her grandma would rather she marry money than make it herself. Meeting a boy is even better than applying for a receptionist job in Nana’s eyes.

“Wonderful,” she exclaims, reaching across the dinner table and squeezing Harry's arm. “If you want to borrow my perfume, let me know.” 

Harry says yes, just to be amicable, and sprays it on her wrist before heading to bed. Lying in the dark, she inhales old-lady jasmine scent, thinking, _and you come to me on a summer breeze,_ because she can’t get that song out of her head. As her eyes grow heavy, she half-dreams about the few inches of green, stagnant water at the bottom of the pool, Louis’s board-wheels sailing through it, leaving twin trails of wet cement behind her, like a boat’s wake. 

—-

Harry calls her on her princess phone the next day when her grandma leaves for town. Her palms are sweaty, and she twists the cord around her finger nervously, wondering if Louis’s going to pick up, if this is the right number, or if she was so freaked out that Harry pulled a knife on her that she gave her a bogus one. It rings once, twice, three times before someone picks up, and Harry’s heart stops. “Hullo?” Louis’s sleepy voice asks, and it’s, like, _almost noon,_ but maybe she isn’t awake yet. Harry imagines her hair down in tangles around her shoulders, a pillow crease in her cheek. 

“Hey,” she says, ever twisting that cord, doing it like her life _depends_ on it. “It’s Harriet...with the negligent grandparents and empty pool?” 

“I thought we were friends,” Louis mumbles. 

“What?” Harry asks, sort of panicking because this isn’t the answer she prepared for when she practiced in front of the mirror before she got the guts to call. “Do you not remember me?” 

“Of course…course I remember you,” Louis coughs out, sounding a bit more awake now. “You _did_ pull a knife on me when we first met. You’re sort of unforgettable, yeah?” she jokes, and Harry’s too stunned to respond, so Louis adds, “Thought I was allowed to call you Harry, but maybe I’m still on probation.” 

“Oh, right,” Harry blurts, stumbling over her words, rolling onto her stomach and hiding her face in her arms because, _god,_ why is she being so _bad_ at talking on the phone? She loves the phone. It’s her friend. If it were a human, she’d _totally_ let it call her Harry. “You…yeah. You aren’t on probation, m’just nervous? Like, my grandma would kill me if she knew I was inviting two _skaters_ to come over,” she explains. 

Louis giggles. “Are you telling me this is an invitation?” 

“Yes,” Harry says with false confidence. “They’re gone...my grandparents, I mean, and Nana won't be back until this evening, so if you and Zayn, I guess, wanna come over, you can. I’ll even leave the gate open, so you don’t have to climb the fence like a criminal.” 

Louis’s giggle turns into a snort, and Harry feels giddy, like she won something for making Louis laugh like that. “Right on, I’ll see if he’s up for it. See you in a little while, Harry.” 

She hangs up, and Harry tries not to kick the air like a _child_ as she listens to the dial tone droning on in her ear. Her next task is to figure out what to wear, which is a real challenge because she doesn’t want to seem like she's trying to _impress_ anyone. She’s not, after all, she just wants Louis to think that she’s cool, and she doesn’t imagine Louis to be the sort who cares about what anyone _wears,_ so there’s no reason to dress up, is there? Or maybe dress down? Should she ditch her usual eyeliner? Should she pretend she doesn't care when she does? Or would that be fake and even _more_ undesirable? Why does she want to be desirable to Louis in the _first place,_ is she _that_ desperate for human contact? 

In the end, she opts to leave her hair down and her sunglasses on, paired with yesterday’s too-small gym shorts so that it doesn’t seem like she’s the type to care if she repeats outfits (she is, but maybe this is the _new_ Harry, the Harry who lets skaters invade her grandmother’s backyard because loneliness has made her go the tiniest bit crazy). She slathers her legs in Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil, plops herself on a lounger with _Tiger Beat_ , and waits. 

Zayn and Louis arrive just about the time when Harry thinks they aren’t going to show up at all, tripping through the gate as Louis skates over to her, long blonde tips trailing in the breeze. “So sorry, Harry, Zayn here takes tens of thousands of years to get ready. He's the girl in our relationship,” she sighs, and Harry sits up abruptly, caught off guard, _caught_ period, like she was doing something naughty instead of just lying in the sun feeling pitiful and wondering if she was ever going to see Louis again. 

“It’s okay,” she shrugs, “I was just reading’n’tanning.” Then, because the full implications of what Louis just said have suddenly hit her in full, she adds, “Wait, are you guys…like…a couple?” 

Louis and Zayn both make disgusted, affronted faces, and Harry isn’t sure why this makes her feel better, but it does. “Ew, no, absolutely not,” Zayn yelps immediately, shoving Louis like it's somehow her fault that Harry misunderstood the joke. “Louis and I have been friends since middle school. _Just_ friends, I mean, she’s more like a sister to me. I have a girlfriend, thank you very much,” Zayn disclaims, flipping his board and kicking up onto it easily before circling Harry’s lounger like a very bored shark. 

“I wouldn’t date Zayn if he were, like, the last person on earth,” Louis announces. 

“Hey!” Zayn gasps, trying to do a board-flip thing and messing up. “That’s a bit harsh,” he grumbles. 

“It’s true,” Louis chuckles in a sing-song voice, before turning to Harry and fucking _winking._ She has elbow and knee pads on, and they’re all scraped up on the plastic panels and sweat-stained on the elastic, making her look like she’s geared up for battle, so tough and hard. “Thank you, Harry, for letting us in your pool,” she adds, nodding to her before she _winks again,_ which feels like a punch to the gut, something private between them. Harry just wishes she knew _what._ She always feels like she’s a step behind. 

“It’s fine,” Harry assures her. “Now impress me with your skating. I’ve seen tricks on some of those TV specials...can you guys do tricks?” 

Zayn scoffs, skating to the edge of the pool and leaning off it precariously, balancing on the lip with his board. It’s admittedly pretty groovy. “Course we can do tricks. Watch and learn, mysterious knife girl.” 

Louis has a gentler approach. “We know a few,” she grins. “You wanna see?” 

Harry does, so she nods, pretending that her mouth isn't peculiarly dry at the prospect. Louis smiles brightly at her and kicks onto her board effortlessly, shouting something unintelligible to Zayn before crouching low and rolling into the pool like it’s nothing. Harry tries not to gasp as she pulls her lounger to the very rim and watches with wide, watering eyes. 

—-

Zayn and Louis come by very nearly every day after that. Nana leaves in the morning in her jogging pants, and Harry calls Louis as soon as the car turns out of the cul-de-sac, bombarding her with jokes and dumb puns the more comfortable she gets in their friendship. (Louis usually responds with something twice as clever that leaves Harry in wheezing stitches.) After the phone call, Louis and Zayn will then skate over from a few neighborhoods away, making it to Harry’s yard within the hour, cheeks red and shiny from the heat, sweat on their temples. 

Harry usually sits on the edge of the pool, cheering them on or offering cheeky commentary that Louis always laughs at because it makes Zayn lose his concentration and crash more often than not. Harry doesn't feel like she’s learned a single thing about skating, but it's fun to watch. She loves the way that Louis's long hair gets lighter 

Harry sometimes makes them cucumber sandwiches and lemonade if she has enough time or feels ambitious; other times, she just brings out the Coke bottles that her grandpa uses to chase his whiskey when he's not off golfing in Palm Springs. Louis can down half a Coke bottle in a single gulp without burping, and it’s such a spectacular union of ladylike and utterly _not_ that Harry always makes sure to watch closely, eyes shielded against the sun. Harry’s legs are a deep golden tan now, and her grandma approves, so she doesn't ask about the missing soda, if she notices at all. 

After a week or so of this routine, Zayn rolls up to her mid-skate session, wiping perspiration from his brow. “Hey, Harry,” he says, which is unusual, since Zayn usually only addresses Harry with increasingly strange nicknames. Louis insists it's because he thinks she’s cool, but Harry suspects it's the exact opposite. “Do you mind if my lady comes next time? She’s getting, like, jealous that I’m going over to a girl’s house every day, and I think it would help if she actually met you.” 

Harry wonders if she should be insulted or flattered if apparently just _meeting_ her is enough to assure Zayn’s girlfriend that she’s not a real threat, but it’s ultimately fine by her because she doesn't actually _want_ to be perceived as a threat. Harry knows that Zayn’s technically attractive or whatever, but she has _zero_ interest in him that way, and the last thing she wants is some random girl hating her because she happens to have an empty pool and access to her grandparents’ chasers. “Sure,” she tells him, sliding her sunglasses down her nose to look him in the eye. “But why doesn't she care that you hang out with Lou all the time?” she asks then, not at all sure why it’s different. Maybe it’s because Zayn and Louis have been friends for so long, or maybe it’s because Louis is, in some ways, more like a boy than a girl with her dirty nails and scabby knees and wide, flat-footed stance. Harry has never seen Louis cock her hip coyly or bat her lashes or even really play with her hair unless she’s tying it up or touching it idly. Louis _never_ does the flirty mannerisms around Zayn that she’s noticed other girls do around boys. 

“Lou’s different,” Zayn shrugs. “She’s Lou.” 

Louis does some sort of impressive inversion thing off the side of the pool before landing it perfectly and rolling swiftly back down into the concrete bowl, wheels clacking as she shouts, “Perrie knows I’d _never,_ but she isn’t sure about you.” 

“I’d never, either,” Harry explains, wrinkling her nose and swigging down a fizzy mouthful of Coke. “I’m not like that.” 

“But she doesn't know that,” Louis counters, breathless as she surfaces on the other side of the pool before losing her board and tripping a bit, cursing. “She’s groovy, though, you’ll like her.” 

When Perrie comes over the following day, Harry _does_ like her, though it takes a bit of time for them to properly warm up to each other. Perrie is, for one, way prettier and cooler than Harry was prepared for, which makes her feel like a mollusk or something in comparison, ugly and small and hiding in a sea-battered shell. Harry sort of thought Perrie would be cool like Louis is cool, a skater girl with scrapes and sunburnt arms, but she’s actually a Playboy-model-type hippie with long, bottle-blonde hair and eyes like sea-glass lined in a perfect ring of black. She’s chewing gum when she lies down next to Harry on a lounger, flat and golden stomach peeping out from between the waistband of her long flared jeans and macrame top. “So, who's your favorite?” she asks before she even says hello, reaching over and tapping a long manicured nail along the spine of Harry’s issue of _Tiger Beat_. “Who’re you gonna marry?” 

Harry is sort of baffled, both by the question and by Perrie’s _face_ , so symmetrical and blemish free. She looks much older than Harry, somehow, even though she knows she technically isn’t, maybe two years at best, like Louis. “Um,” she blushes, “Shaun Cassidy...and Bobby Benson, I guess.” 

Perrie makes a face at that, like she isn’t sure if Harry’s serious. “Bobby and Shaun look like girls,” she declares with certainty, pursing her lips. They have something shiny on them, maybe Yardly gloss, only it looks natural, as if she and her lips are just _like_ that, pretty and put together in this way that Harry has to try _so hard_ to pull off. 

“He does not,” Harry argues. She _knows_ that she’s picky about boys. She always thought it meant she just had really good taste, but she feels exposed now, like she’s treading water only to realize that the pool’s empty, that she’s gonna plummet to the bottom and get scraped like Louis did after she messed up a flip and skidded down the domed side just yesterday, making the skin of her left elbow all raw and lymphy. “Who do _you_ like?” 

“Hmm…,” Perrie ponders, shifting so that she’s on her back, kicking out of a strappy sandal and idly swinging her leg. Her toes are painted a pale yellow, and Harry _usually_ gets manicures, but she sort of stopped this summer because there was no reason to when her only friends were two skaters, one of them being Louis, who she could only impress by pretending she wasn’t trying to impress anyone in the first place. Now, though, Harry wishes that she had kept the manicures up. “I like Richard Hatch...he’s really dreamy. Dirk, too, from _Battlestar_? Zayn makes me watch that show because he loves space and astronomy. It’s actually sort of far out, though, and the boys are fab,” she explains. 

Harry’s equal parts shocked and disgusted. Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict seem so _old_ and _manly_ to her, like they’re _dads_ or something. “Really?!” she blurts out, mouth hanging open. “But they’re, like…ancient!” 

Perrie busts out laughing then and reaches over to give Harry a loose, one-armed hug, which is so unexpected that it makes Harry freeze up. “You’re funny,” she says, snapping her gum in Harry’s ear. “I’m Perrie...that idiot’s girlfriend.” 

“I’m Harry,” she responds breathlessly as she pulls away, arranging herself on her lounger. “Do you want a Coke? Or to help me make some lemonade?” 

“Oooh! Real lemonade or the kind from the powder? Because I’ll put lemon juice in my hair but not in my mouth. _Real_ lemons are too sour for me,” Perrie announces, kicking the air with her delicate feet. She has a tiny, woven anklet on, and Harry thinks of the one that she has in her bedroom at home, silver with a horseshoe charm. Part of her wishes she was wearing it now, but the other part feels like the silver would be too fancy in comparison to Perrie’s hemp anklet, that Perrie would think her lifestyle, her entire _life,_ is superficial in comparison to whatever cool hippie things she does, her rebel life dating a rebel skater. It makes Harry wish that _she_ had a rebel skater to date, even if 99.9% of boys are disgusting. 

Then, as it often does, Harry’s gaze skirts over to Louis, who hasn't judged her yet for anything, at least not to her face. Louis’s shoving Zayn and laughing about something, throwing her head back and slapping her knees, mouth open wide, teeth bright and flashing. Harry wants to laugh like that, wants to be the sort of girl who wears hemp, the sort of girl who doesn’t _care_ about any of this, who isn’t constantly worrying about what other people think about her, who doesn’t _need_ to have a boyfriend to make her a rebel _._ She sighs, turns back to Perrie, and tells her, “It’s Country Time, like…definitely powder, mostly sugar,” smiling as she adds, “Guess you have good taste...you know, for someone who doesn’t like Shaun Cassidy.” 

Perrie laughs again, looking all perfect and sun-kissed, like a Clairol ad come to life or something. “Whatever you say. _Battlestar_ is, like, Babe City, and you’re missing out, but I’ll take them all if you aren’t interested, ” she grins. “Now, show me around your pad.” 

They get on famously after that. Harry likes having someone to lie around, tan, and share sodas with, someone who will pore over old issues of _Tiger Beat_ with her and laugh at all the pictures, drawing mustaches and devil horns on John Travolta, a boy (man?) they both agree is Not Cute. Louis usually skates over to tease them, draping herself across Harry's lounger and changing the lyrics of “Hey Deanie” to “Hey Harry,” getting in her face and crooning, “ _O_ h, hey, Harry won't you come out tonight, the summer's waitin', the moon is shinin' so bright,”probably because the whole spectacle makes Harry blush and squirm so hard that she gets physically nauseated. While it's happening, she desperately wants it to stop, but once Louis ruffles her curls and rolls off to tip back into the pool, leaving her because Louis’s attention span is never very long, Harry wishes she were back. 

She loves having Louis’s attention, craves the singular, important way that it makes her feel. Like the sun glaring down on them sharp and golden against the suburban horizon is for her and her alone, like it's the same thing as Louis’s bright, hectic smile, like the heat in her gut is the same as the heat on her skin, the heat on her cheeks when Louis’s voice cracks over, “Hey Deanie, you're the one I'm dreamin' of.”

It’s the same sensation she remembers from 5th grade, when her riding instructor went on maternity leave and her replacement was an honest-to-god cowgirl from Oklahoma. She had shiny black hair that she wore in a long braid down her back, and her arms were toned and freckled, so different from any of the stuffy old dressage queens at the barn that Harry could hardly speak around her. She wowed Harry’s jumping class with wild tales of dude-rides from Texas to Mexico, of getting thrown from broncos in rodeos, of breaking wild mustangs. She was the most thrilling person Harry had ever met, and she never quite learned how to get a hold on the terror and overwhelm she felt around her, the desperate need to be like her, or at least to be her friend. To be as close to her as possible at all times, even if that time was painful and awkward, and she was a mess of blushing self-recrimination, an idle wish to be someone else, someone better. 

With Louis, it's somehow worse, though, since she’s a _peer_ not a teacher, not someone in a position of power. It makes no _sense_ for Harry to be such a mess around her, so _compromised_ when she teases, but no matter how she tries to steel herself against it, she's always left sputtering in the heat of Louis’s grin, her taunts. It feels like something she could figure out, maybe, if she thought about it hard enough. But for some reason, she doesn't _want_ to think about it too hard. Pressing on it feels like she’s teetering on the edge of a precipice, like she could hurtle into nothingness and splatter on the pavement if she pushed too hard, wondered too much. 

So she shrieks and shoves Louis away when she sings, then longs for her to come back and feels like she’s gonna die of embarrassment when she does. But she doesn't think about what any of that means. She just drinks her lemonade and lies in the sun and watches the increasingly blonde tips of Louis’s hair get carried on the wind as she zips by, wheels clacking on the cement. 

—-

Most days, Louis, Zayn, and Perrie all come together, but Louis shows up a few times alone, rolling her eyes in exasperation and telling Harry, “They were just taking forever, and I got sick of waiting,” or “Z has a dentist appointment,” or, in one particularly unfortunate case, “Walked in on something that I’d rather not talk about.” 

Harry sort of loves it when it’s just her and Lou because they chat more than Louis skates, and Harry actually gets to _learn_ things about her instead of just watching from the sidelines and wondering, inventing. She finds out that Louis’s the oldest in a family of little brothers raised by her single mom, a woman who Louis describes as her hero more than once. Harry thinks that’s the nicest and best thing she’s ever heard from a girl her age; most of her friends hate their moms, forever complaining about how they don’t let them _do_ anything, how they're _so_ old-fashioned or prudish with their endless bogus rules. She learns that Louis just graduated high school this June and might take community college classes in the fall, but she also might get a job waiting tables somewhere close to home so that she’s around to pick up her little brothers from their endless list of practices and after-school activities and daycares. 

She learns that Louis has never had a boyfriend. 

Oddly, it makes her feel better about something that she didn't even know she felt bad about. Relief, maybe, like if Louis (who’s brilliant and hilarious and cool and pretty in her own strange way) has never had a boyfriend and doesn't seem sad about it, there’s no reason for Harry to be sad, either. She thinks that’s the part she was feeling sad about, anyway. 

She learns that Louis has never ridden a horse or been out of the country, a quiet disparity between them that makes Harry feel sort of guilty and self-conscious, that maybe Louis thinks she’s just a silly, patronizing rich girl doing charity for someone who isn't as well off. She worries about it enough to ask, and Louis actually snorts at her, waving her hand through the air and sucking lemonade up with the Krazy Straw she apparently “borrowed” from one of her little brothers. “Don’t be like that,” she admonishes. “The only bigger bummer than a rich girl is one who apologizes for being rich. We’re friends, Harry, it’s cool. You don’t have to share, but you are. Don't make a big deal out it. Like, be grateful for what you have.” 

“I’m grateful,” Harry promises, swirling the ice around her glass and trying to ignore the delighted thrill in her gut when Louis calls them _friends. “_ And…thank you, I guess. For coming around every day…my summer was looking pretty square before you showed up.” 

Louis grins, and Harry feels dizzy, so she looks away. “Yeah, well, thank _you_ for, like, not being a narc. That day could have gone really differently.” 

“I’m glad it didn’t,” Harry says, throwing back the rest of her lemonade and wiping her lips with the back of her hand, staring at the sun-bleached plastic of her lounger instead of frosted blue of Louis’s eyes. 

She learns that Louis’s favorite ice cream is mint chip, so she has Nana buy some at the grocery store the very next time they shop, assuring her that she won’t eat it all herself, she promises. She learns that Louis’s favorite bands are Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Buzzcocks. It’s a bit of a mishmash, Harry thinks, but Louis also admits that she “doesn’t mind a bit of disco, if I’m in a dancing mood _._ ”The way she says it sounds like a code, and Harry once again wishes that she _knew_ what Louis was implying when she says things laced in that particular brand of intensity, when she looks at Harry with her eyes hard and blue and flashing, like she’s really saying, _you know what I mean, don’t you?_

Harry doesn’t. But she wants to. 

—-

It’s a particularly scorching Wednesday afternoon that Louis skates into Harry’s backyard with her hair chopped off, and, at first, Harry thinks that the heat has gotten to her, that she’s hallucinating, that Louis’s a mirage or something. 

“Well, don’t look so shocked, it's only hair,” Louis jokes, making a face at her, elbowing Zayn, who’s snickering. “Your mouth is actually hanging open.” 

Harry recovers, taking off her sunglasses and cleaning the lenses with the hem of her yellow bikini nervously. “M’sorry, I didn’t…I didn’t mean to freak out. I was just surprised. It looks cool, kinda like Shaun Cassidy.” 

Louis gasps, and Zayn dissolves into hysterics, doubling over and cackling, like Louis being compared to Shaun Cassidy is the funniest thing he’s heard in his life. “ _Burn,_ Harry, Jesus,” he eventually wheezes, and Perrie punches him without looking up from the macrame key chain that she’s deftly weaving with her fingers. 

“It wasn't supposed to be a burn,” Harry says quickly, cheeks flushing a fierce red. She wants to see if she’s offended Louis, but she’s afraid to look at her because she doesn’t think that she can face her hair, or something. The angle of her face looks so different, sharp and boyish yet _not_ ;it’s soft in a way that’s indescribable, as if she's exposed, uncovered, raw. Harry’s eyes sting, and she blinks rapidly, her entire focus on what it might feel like to push her fingers into this new, shiny length of Louis’s hair. “I swear.” 

“I know...not coming from you, it isn’t,” Louis sighs, reaching over and mussing up Harry’s curls, which are already a frizzy disaster because the humidity turns them into a poof-ball, and it’s _swelteringly_ humid today. It must be going to Harry’s head. “You’re giving Zayn more reasons to rag on me.” 

“You’re the one who got a Shaun Cassidy haircut, this is all your fault...you _chose this_ ,”Zayn defends himself, pointing. 

“Well, I think it looks fab,” Perrie proclaims, needling him in the side again. 

“That’s because you cut it,” Zayn reminds her. 

“I decided to do it because it was too hot on my neck. It’s still too long, though, so I wanna go even shorter. Gonna have Perrie chop the rest...figured we would wait until you’re here because I bet you have some fancy hair-cutting scissors,” Louis muses, sitting on Harry’s lounger and getting in her space, running her fingers through the newly short strands, showing Harry like Harry wants to see it up close. And she does, but at the same time, she doesn’t. Her insides are a mess of warring impulses, so she sits up abruptly and sidesteps to the sliding glass door.

“Yeah, I do...hold on a sec, lemme get them. Let’s do it out here, though, so we can just sweep the hair into the planter. Birds can, like, use it. For their nests,” she adds gracelessly, officially winning the title for the single dorkiest and most awkward girl in the universe. 

Inside, her eyes adjust to the lower light as she blinks the sunspots away, stumbling, hands shaking. _Harry, stop,_ she tells herself, even though she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to be stopping, what she’s even doing. _Just stop._

Back outside, Perrie snips off another inch or so, bringing Louis’s hair closer to her skull in a hybrid bowl and crewcut. She doesn’t look like Shaun Cassidy anymore, but Harry still has a hard time looking at her, lest she stare with a weird, obvious longing ache in her chest, aimless and nameless. 

—- part two 

Louis comes alone the next day, a torn backpack on her shoulders and an extra skateboard tucked under her arm. “So,” she says, dropping both boards with a flourish, eyebrows quirked up and something mischievous twisting her lips “I told the other two to stay home today because I thought maybe you might want to learn to skate but without, like, an audience, you know?” 

Harry’s stomach flips over. “Louis…no. M’gonna fall on my face and crack my head open!” 

“No, you won’t, I brought you a helmet! It’s my brother’s...he has a giant head, so it should fit over all your curls, I think,” Louis explains, fishing a scuffed, faded red helmet out of her backpack and plopping it onto Harry’s head without much ceremony. It smells like stale sweat and old plastic, prompting Harry to wrinkle her nose. “Ta dah!” Louis grins triumphantly, her smile so wide that Harry’s cheeks throb for her. 

“I’m the clumsiest person alive,” she warns as Louis takes her hands and hauls her to her feet, close enough that Harry can smell her sunscreen, something thick and white like Coppertone, not like the tanning oil that she and Perrie use. It should remind her of childhood, of field trips to conservation sites and the beach, but instead it just makes her dizzy, itchy, scared. “I don't think I can do this.” 

“Sure you can! You ride _horses_ , and they’re, like, a million pounds and huge and have minds of their own. Boards are _much_ closer to the ground. Plus, m’gonna be right here, I won’t let you fall.” 

Louis’s proximity is the thing that actually makes Harry feel like she's in over her head, but she doesn't know how to tell Louis that without seeming square and uncool, a tag-along little sister who wishes she could just _impress_ Louis, be good at things instantly so that she never has to look like a fool. “What if I’m terrible at it?” 

“We’re all terrible when we start out, that’s why it’s just me. It’ll be fun, c’mon, Harry,” she pleads, holding up the backpack and swinging it invitingly. “I brought some of my old wrist guards and knee pads! You’ll be totally protected.” 

Harry sighs and collapses back onto the lounger, which squeaks plaintively. “Okay,” she agrees, pouting. “But you can’t, like, make fun of me.” 

“I’ll be nice, I promise,” Louis vows, reaching out and brushing her knuckles every so gently and briefly across Harry’s knee, making her shiver. “Now let’s get you padded up.” 

The knee pads are sweat-stained and stretched out so they’re a bit loose on Harry’s skinnier legs, but Louis says they'll be fine as long as they stay up (and they should since Harry probably won’t be taking any hard falls). Harry pulls them up over the joint nervously, stomach continuously swooping as she imagines a younger version of Louis wearing this very same pair, trying and failing at executing the same ollie over and over again until she landed it, whooping in joy as she always does when she figures out a new trick, voice higher than it is now, cracking sometimes when things rush out too fast. 

The elbow and wrist pads fit more snugly, and as Harry buckles the helmet’s strap under her chin and wobbles to her feet, Louisgrins at her fiercely, squeezing her shoulders like a boxing coach giving a pep talk. “Okay, how do you feel? Nervous?” 

“I dunno…sort of like a scarecrow...my arms and legs are all stiff and weird with these things,” Harry mutters, warily eyeing the board that Louis brought her. It’s smaller than a horse, sure, but she can’t bargain with it, she can’t earn its trust. It’s just sandpaper and wood and wheels. 

“We’ll go slowly,” Louis assures her, gently fitting her hand to the curve of Harry’s lower back and guiding her, thumb against her spine. It’s not much, it’s idle and shouldn’t matter, but Harry’s breath catches at that simple contact, warm and anchoring through her shirt. 

“To the pool?” Harry asks nervously as Louis kicks one of the two boards to her. It’s a bit wider and more beat up than Louis’s, a faded, spray-painted Van Halen logo decorating the top.

“Nah, we’re gonna stay here on flat ground to start with. The pool slants too much,” Louis explains, surveying Harry, eyes sweeping from top to bottom, from the borrowed helmet to her too-clean white Keds. “The first thing you’re gonna need to figure out is which foot you have forward. Otherwise, it gets confusing, and you can easily lose your balance. So, like, if you’re about to run into the kitchen and slide on the tile in your socks, which leg do you start with?” 

Harry rubs anxiously at her elbow pad. Sweat is collecting beneath it, and she feels scrutinized, like Louis isn't just looking at her but _into_ her. “Um, you say that like it’s a universal experience? I don't think I’ve ever slid on the kitchen floor in my socks,” she confesses. 

“Really?!” Louis exhales, making a face, tongue pressed into her cheek. “What did you _do_ as a kid?” 

“I dunno...ballet class,” Harry says, cheeks coloring because she _knows_ how prissy it sounds, “and mucking stalls at riding camp.”

Louis sighs, cocking her head and running her fingers through her hair before lighting up again. “What are those called, when you spin? Pirouettes? What leg do you start with, like, what’s your dominant side when you do those?” 

Harry thinks about it for three seconds until she realizes that she actually has to demo, so she does a quick, sloppy pirouette right there in her sneakers, which squeak on the cement. Louis giggles at her, but it doesn’t seem mean, just fond, so she doesn’t feel too embarrassed when she wobbles upright and reports, “Right leg, I think.” 

“Okay, rad, we’ll start there, then. Now, I want you to just walk right up to the board, keep your feet pointing forward, like this, and step on with that front foot,” she tells her, demonstrating and making it look absolutely effortless. Harry stares, enraptured by Louis’s movements, how she can have scabbed knees and bruises on her calves and a smudge of asphalt on her upper arm and still look so _soft,_ so delicate. Louis pushes off the ground and steps onto the board, wrists at an elegant angle as she continues, “Then, you push off with your nondominant leg a few times before you hop up onto the board. Your feet’ll stop being forward, like, you sort of shift your weight until they’re facing sideways, like this,” she describes, doing it again but more exaggerated this time. “It’s a tough transition, but once you nail it, you’ll have the basics. Ready to try?” she asks, doing a quick trick-thing that Harry has no name for and hopping off her board easily. It _looks_ like ballet, honestly, and Harry’s breath is so caught up in her throat that she can’t answer immediately. “Hey,” Louis says then, cocking her head. “If you really don't want to do this, we—”

“No, no, I do want to try, I do...m’just nervous, I’m sorry,” Harry interrupts quickly, arms crossed as she rolls her weight onto the balls of her feet anxiously. “Let’s do it.” 

“Alright,” Louis grins, holding out her arm and gesturing for Harry to get closer. “The first step is the hardest, just getting up there…would it make you feel better if you, like, just climbed up however you wanted and used me as a balance? We could roll a few feet just so you can see how it feels...would that help? I do that with my little brothers sometimes. It’s like training wheels.” 

Harry nods, the knot in her chest loosening a bit. She doesn’t want Louis to see her as a little brother, something about that twists in her gut a bit, but at the same time, she _really_ doesn’t want to fall and break her arm, either. “Perfect, let’s do that,” she agrees. 

Harry doesn't even realize that she’s holding her breath for the next few seconds as she steps onto the board with one foot, her hands clutching Louis’s shoulders in a death grip as she attempts to stabilize herself. Louis’s skin is warm and greasy with sunscreen, sliding easily under Harry’s sweaty palms as she grabs the cut sleeves of Louis’s homemade Jefferson Starship tanktop. It’s only when she starts to get a bit lightheaded that she reflexively inhales, lungs burning as they fill with air. “Breathe, Harry,” Louis murmurs gently, holding her waist in her hands. It’s like they’re middle schoolers at a Sadie Hawkins social, practicing a slow dance before forcing themselves to actually ask a boy. Except that Harry is way too nervous for it to be a practice dance, too tied up inside considering that Louis’s just a girl, just a _friend_ that she admires. The board zig-zags a bit under her shifting weight, her legs wobbly. “You’re almost there,” Louis encourages, voice so quiet that it's very nearly nothing but air tickling against Harry’s throat, her breath smelling human and salty-warm in a way that makes Harry’s mouth water. “I promise that once you get up there, you’ll realize that you’re freaking out over nothing.” 

Harry takes a deep breath, her skin tingling where Louis’s holding her steady, and then she steps up cautiously with the other foot, wavering a bit but not tipping over or anything, which is sort of inspiring. “Ah, okay, m’here, what do I do now?” she asks, a sudden giddiness washing over her. She lets out a nervous, breathy laugh, and Louis digs her thumbs into the soft curves at her hips and her heels into the pavement to make sure that the board doesn’t move under Harry’s still-unsteady weight. 

“Just stand there for a second,” Louis says, looking up at her and smiling brilliantly. Her teeth are so white and her eyes are so blue and her hair looks so soft where it sweeps over her golden brow, looking like a prince or something, and Harry wobbles a bit, like a flame held to the wind. “See, you’re still shaky...that’s fine, we’ll just wait until you’re comfortable.” 

Harry isn’t sure that she’ll ever be comfortable, not with Louis’s hand on her, not when she’s standing a good four or five inches taller than Louis when she's used to less. Their height difference is more pronounced with the board, and she can feel Louis’s exhalations on her sternum now, which is making her stomach swoop, the butterflies tremble. _Why am I so nervous?_ she asks herself, but she _knows_ that there’s a reason why she doesn’t have an answer, a reason why she refuses to press on the raw skin around the place where she keeps Louis’s name tucked near her heart. 

She focuses on breathing, on laughing when Louis makes stupid jokes, and eventually, eventually she feels stable enough to push off from the ground and roll a few inches. Louis guides her, smile like sunlight, and Harry’s terrified at the same time she never wants this to end. 

“Atta girl,” Louis beams, and Harry grins back, teeth bared and cheeks so flushed that she can feel them burning. “Now let’s see if you can do it on your own.” 

—-

The lesson goes well into the late afternoon, even as the sun starts to drop along the horizon and disappear behind the endless skyline of identical roofs all in a line. Harry laughs so much that she’s breathless and only falls twice, if you don’t count the time that she very nearly plummeted face first into the pavement before Louis caught her by the elbow and hauled her up before any critical damage could happen. 

She's getting the hang of the push off, even though she still can’t get her feet facing to the side in time, but it doesn’t even matter because that’s not why this is fun, it’s not why she wants to keep climbing up and trying again. She could never master a lick of skating and this would still be a perfect day because once she gets past her initial insecurities and blundering, her choked-up fear, she has such a _brilliant_ time cracking up with Louis, glowing at every compliment, craving more praise and basking in the warm, sure shift of her palms. It’s _just_ like her old riding instructor, only Louis’s her friend, so when they get hungry, they stop and eat ice cream sandwiches and oranges in the kitchen, Harry showing Louis how to get the whole peel off in a single spiral, how to eat a entire banana in one go. “Not sure the orange thing is more than a party trick, but that banana thing is a skill you could practically apply,”Louis jokes, knocking her shoulder into Harry so that she stumbles, gasping and affronted.

“Gross, stop,” Harry shrieks, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I hope I never have to do that,” she shudders then, hopping up onto the counter so that she can sit by the sink, long legs swinging. “That I marry a man who never wants me to.” 

Louis looks at her for a long time then, a line through her brow as she adjusts her cap, twisting it around so that the bill faces forward for a few seconds before pushing it back to its usual backward-facing position. “If you marry a man, he’ll definitely want you to,” she says, pursing her lips. “Luckily, I’ll never marry a man.” 

Harry’s stomach feels bubbly and weird, so she sets down her banana peel to pour herself a glass of water. “You don’t wanna get married?” she asks nonchalantly while her back is turned to Louis, trying to keep her voice light. 

“No, never,” Louis declares with certainty, maybe even a hint of…defiance? Anger? Harry isn’t sure, but it makes her feel hot and prickly all over, at the same time as a sort of sadness sinks in her gut. Louis pauses, but Harry can tell that she’s going to say something else, so she holds her breath until the other girl adds, “But you…you want that whole life? A husband and kids and a white picket fence and a pool? Wth the water in it? Sucking up to the man?” she tacks on the last bit as a joke, voice cracking as she smiles, but Harry doesn’t think it’s funny. 

Her grip tightens around her glass, and she turns around, staring at the tile beneath her Keds. “I…I don’t know. I always thought I would, you know? It’s just...it’s what you do.” 

“It doesn’t have to be,” Louis tells her, eyes fixed on her feet when Harry gets brave and forces herself to _look up_ , just for a moment, because she _needs_ to. 

“I know,” Harry says, as if she does. But the truth is that she’s never considered any other option before. 

They finish their snacks and water and head into the backyard, and before the sun officially sets and Harry’s grandma gets back home, Louis reluctantly hugs Harry goodbye, arms tight around her shoulders. “You were really… today was radical,” she settles on, breath warm as it tickles against Harry’s ear. “You did great.”

“Thank you for teaching me,” Harry manages to get out, even though her breath is tight in her throat, her heart pounding as Louis presses her close, like it’s terrified to be trapped between them. “I…yeah. I had fun.” 

Louis pulls away and salutes Harry before grabbing her skateboard, and in seconds, she’s gone, the sound of her wheels echoing down the street as she heads back to her neighborhood in the encroaching dusk. Harry stays curled up on the lounger for a long time, not sure why there are tears prickling in her eyes, not sure why they roll down her cheeks as she blinks, wiping her nose.

—-

Lee-Anne comes back from vacation the next day, and she’s still up north, but at least Harry can _talk_ to her, call her up in the evening after everyone’s left so that she can hear about Barbados. Honestly, though, she’s mostly just dying to tell Lee-Anne about her new friends, about the unexpected turn her summer took that afternoon when she stumbled to the pool holding a kitchen knife ready to defend her pearls like a suburban housewife gone mad. She wants to tell her about her skating lesson, about Perrie painting her nails, about the giant secret that she’s keeping from her grandparents. She wants to tell her about Louis, every little brilliant, wonderful detail. The tri-point constellation of freckles on her cheek, the little scar on her eyebrow, the way she never wears makeup, the name of every one of her baby brothers, the soft, delicate, effortless way that she moves her hands when she talks, like everything and nothing matters, like she’s fashioned from sunshine, from stardust. All of these things are practically _bursting_ from Harry’s throat, so after a half-hour or so of clutching the teal plastic receiver of her princess phone until her palms are sweat-damp, listening to meandering tale after meandering tale about every single day of Lee-Anne’s vacation, she’s about ready to explode when Lee-Anne finally asks her, “So, what about you? What have you been doing down in Orange County?” 

“Well,” Harry starts, squirming onto her stomach and rubbing her thighs together before lowering her voice. “I made some friends...they’re skaters. A few weeks ago, they climbed my back wall to skate in the pool, since it’s drained, right? And I sort of freaked at first because I thought they were robbers,” Harry explains, pausing dramatically to hear Lee-Anne’s predictable gasp. Of all her friends, Lee-Anne is easily the most rule-abiding. She’s a straight-A student who runs track and is totally boy crazy but only in theory, since she isn’t actually allowed to ever spend time around them. 

“Skaters?!” she hisses. “Like, boy skaters? Do they have long hair?” 

“One’s a boy, his name is Zayn, and, no, he doesn’t have long hair. He has tattoos, though, and smokes,” Harry says quickly, adding the details for the sake of intrigue but wanting to talk about _Louis_ already. 

“Is he cute?” Lee-Anne asks, sounding as excited as she is skeptical. “He sounds cute, in a bad-boy way. Boys with tattoos can be foxy. And Zayn’s an interesting name.” 

“He’s…,” Harry trails off, struggling because she _knows_ on some level that Zayn’s handsome, even _very_ handsome. He has long eyelashes and a sharp jaw, and when he takes his shirt off, he’s cut and angled in all the right places, segmented muscles in his stomach, shoulders sinewy but still broad. After all, he _must_ be decent for a girl like Perrie to date him, Perrie and her gorgeous, flat golden stomach and plush lips and flyaway blonde hair. But she just doesn't feel that way about Zayn, can’t even imagine it, really. She thinks that if she saw his picture in _Tiger Beat_ , glossy and non-threatening and two-dimensional, she might even rank him somewhere close to Bobby Benson. Maybe even higher. But it’s _different_ when he’s in her backyard and she sees him up close, a _real_ boy instead of the idea of one. She doesn’t know how to describe all this to someone like Lee-Anne, though, so she answers, “He’s cute, but he has a girlfriend. She’s rad, we hang out, too.” 

“Rad,” Lee-Anne repeats, like she’s trying on the word. “And he’s nice?”

“Yeah, _they're_ really nice,” Harry says carefully, again trying to steer conversation to Louis, even though she's increasingly aware that Lee-Anne might not actually _understand_ what’s so special about her, why Harry could spend hours singing her praises. It’s in this moment that she decides it’s better to _not_ tell Lee-Anne about Louis. Not to keep her a secret, necessarily, but to keep her close to her heart. Their friendship seems like something too magical and important to talk about in half-truths to someone who would only half-care. Harry takes a deep breath, adding, “I’ve gotten so tan but probably not as tan as you, since you were in the tropics.” 

“I _am_ pretty tan,” Lee-Ann admits, not without a bit of a boasting tone before launching into another story about Barbados, leaving Harry both disappointed and relieved. With the receiver pressed between her shoulder and ear, she tries to listen, drifting in and out of attention while rubbing absentmindedly at the place on her forearm where Louis once scrawled out her number in ballpoint pen. 

—-

Friday rolls around, and Louis shows up alone again, hands shoved in the pockets of her loose khakis, shoulders bunched around her ears almost apologetically. “It’s date night for Perrie and Z,” she explains, freeing a hand to give Harry a one-armed hug in greeting, prompting a lick of heat to rise up in Harry’s chest, choking her. She isn’t sure when they turned this into a routine, embracing at hello and goodbye, but she’s so grateful for it. It seems like Louis’s the type of person who likes physical contact but doesn’t hand it out indiscriminately; you have to earn her trust before she touches you like that. Harry feels so _lucky_ to be one of these people as Louis presses her close, skin warm and sweat-dewy under the shift of her shirt. Harry feels _chosen._

 _“_ S’fine, we’ll have our own date night,” Harry tells her, stomach in nervous knots because that’s a _joke_ , but when Louis’s this close, her voice comes out funny, choked and trembly in this way that saps the humor out of whatever she’s trying to say. “It’s my Nana’s night out, too, so you can stay late if you want. We could even share a bottle of _wine..._ she won’t notice, she'll think that she drank it herself.” 

“Wine, huh? Right on, I never drink fancy booze,” Louis smiles, cocking her head to look at Harry with bright eyes, the sunlight reducing her pupil to a single dot of black in so much crystal blue. It feels like something Harry could fall into, the missing water from the pool. “You want another skating lesson?” 

Harry does and she doesn’t, a sensation that she’s gotten used to straddling because it comes along with being Louis’s friend. She shrugs, not caring about skating, really, but wanting to be near Louis, to be shown things, to have an excuse to stare, to watch, to hang onto her every word. “Sure,” she mumbles, twisting her toe on the pavement, eyes fixed on the now-chipped white polish Perrie carefully painted on the other day. Harry doesn't feel pretty right now; she feels sweaty and unkempt, and that should be _fine_ around Louis, who’s always sweaty and unkempt, but Harry cares, and she doesn’t understand why. It hasn’t gotten any better, either, she’s _more_ nervous to be alone with a single girl than she is in her bikini while glamorous Perrie and model-foxy Zayn lounge around nearby. It doesn’t make sense. 

“Pad up,” Louis tells her, tossing the backpack and smiling with just the corner of her mouth, soft and fleeting, like a firefly that Harry could catch if only she had a jar. Harry does, head bent as she obediently buckles her helmet and slides the knee pads up her legs. 

They mess around on their boards for an hour of so, deciding to stop while they’re ahead once Harry masters her push and manages to get her feet in the right position to roll a few feet without toppling onto her face. Harry’s giddy with triumph even though only hours ago she thought she didn’t care about skating. “Tell me again how good that push was,” she demands Louis for the tenth time, leaning into her, making sure that their shoulders jostle together electrically where they’re sitting on the edge of the pool, legs dangling as the sun sets, the sky a pinky-rust color, like the flesh of a blood orange. 

“Most radical push I’ve ever seen,” Louis assures her, laughing and shaking her head. 

Things grow quiet as darkness falls, and Harry stares at her knees, flushed but not bruised thanks to Louis catching her every time she nearly fell. The crickets sing, and they watch mosquitoes hover over the few inches of stagnant water left in the pool, insects their only company unless you count the sun as it sinks into the horizon, disappearing behind the silhouette of identical houses. “Thank you,” Harry murmurs, if only to break the silence, to give herself something to do save for aching as she sits here beside Louis, wishing she had a reason to scoot closer, to wrap her arm around Louis’s waist and bury her face into the ditch of her neck and shoulder. “For teaching me to skate even though m’dreadful.” 

“You’re not, though,” Louis says, looking at her through her lashes, almost coyly. “It’s actually, like, not bad at all to figure out the push in two days. You’re well on your way to being a real shredder,” she jokes, and Harry gets pink, feels the heat rise to her ears, a dead giveaway. 

“Thanks,” she mumbles, wondering why, _why_ everything feels so charged when Louis is so close, when Louis’s eyes are on her, burning and blue. 

A moment passes, and Harry grips the cement edge of the pool, willing herself to say something else when quite suddenly, Louis’s warm palm covers the back of her hand, pressing into her where she's white-knuckled and nervous. Her eyes cut to Louis, and panic should be climbing in her throat, but instead a strange placidity washes over her like a tidal wave, all the invisible water in the empty pool drowning her, cloaking her in silent, sudden blue. “Hi,” she says stupidly, watching Louis as Louis watches her, hand warm and damp with perspiration as it rests against her skin. Her own voice sounds like it’s underwater, distant and echoing. 

“Hi,” Louis says, so soft and gentle, the words snagging at the edges like lace tugged over an uneven surface. 

And time…stops. Just halts in its tracks. Harry could be born and live a life and die, all in this single moment of dusk suspended between them. 

“Um,” Harry starts, but before she can get anything out, Louis pushes into her hand, shaking her head as words spill out, ink all over a page, black and absolving, erasing everything that comes before it. Louis so close, everything Harry wishes she could be, wishes she could have. 

“When I sing to you,” she blurts, looking helpless, “M’serious...more serious than I should be.” 

“What…what do you mean?” Harry asks, chest tight, throat tighter. But really, under all of this, part of her _knows._ Part of her surrenders. She tilts closer to Louis, leaning into her, bringing the wild thunder of her heart mere inches away from Louis’s, like there’s a magnet inside her, yearning. 

Louis looks at her for a long time, eyes half-lidded, mouth parted and soft as if around a gasp, something unspoken. And Harry waits for whatever is to come, breath shallow and soft, catching when Louis blinks, every molecule of her body vibrating with a mysterious, powerful _want._ She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for, really, but she knows she _wants_ it. Wants Louis’s trembling restraint to be washed away in the tide so that she can _know,_ so the curtain can be lifted. Harry’s whole body is attuned to every one of Louis’s inhalations, her lips are very nearly _stinging_ in desperate anticipation, so when Louis finally closes her eyes and leans in, it feels like Harry might come apart. 

Louis presses their mouths together with a huff of breath, everything smooth and chaste and salt-worn, like sea-glass, and Harry is _changed_ , forevermore. 

Her heart stops, along with everything else. Louis cups her face gently with the hand that isn’t pressing her palm into cement, and Harry thinks, absurdly, of “Hey Deanie” sung in Louis’s soft raspy voice. _I was a fool for your love from the moment I saw you, like a vision in the darkness of a thousand lost and lonely nights,_ she thinks, skin on fire, mouth flooded. _But my heart threw away the key._

Louis’s breath tastes like heaven, and she kisses so _softly,_ and that’s what this is, isn't it? Kissing, kissing a girl while the moon watches, while the cicadas hum and the air gets dusk-cool and the sky grows dark. It should be strange, but it’s the sanest thing that Harry’s ever done, the answer to her every question, a chorus of _oh._ Oh, this. This all along. And Harry has been kissed before but never like this. Louis moves so slowly and carefully, and _still_ , every second of it feels like falling, Harry’s stomach dropping with each tremulous drag of Louis’s lips, tender and prudent but _hot,_ so hot. Like Louis’s a wildfire, and Harry’s the hillside of dry brush catching and and flaring up, turning to ash. 

They kiss like this for a long time, Louis’s fingers carding carefully through the hair at the base of Harry's skull, thumbing at the soft flyaways near her temples, and Harry wonders how she _missed_ this, how she could have been so wrong and so lost her whole life. She didn't _know_ that she could kiss other girls without it being a joke, she didn't _know_ that Louis might want to do this with her. Her entire existence up until this moment, every confusing dark corner of it, finally, finally makes sense. She whimpers a bit and shuffles closer, pressing deep, and it’s then that Louis opens her mouth, flicking the very tip of her tongue into Harry’s mouth, smoothing it across her lower lip, hot and slick and molten. 

In seconds, their tongues are twining, Harry getting eager and sloppy because she feels crazy, and nothing has ever tasted so good, not ice cream, not pralines, not the expensive sparkling wine from France at her aunt’s wedding. Louis gently pulls her in, so closely that their thighs press flush where they’re sitting, and Harry gasps because she wants _more_ , more skin, more heat. She wants Louis in her arms, their chests together, so that the thud of her heart is matched. She wants Louis impossibly close so she sucks her tongue into her mouth messily, heat tugging low and filthy in her gut as she does it, hand vice-tight on the edge of the pool until she realizes that it doesn’t have to _stay_ there. She can touch Louis, too. 

Her fingers tingle as they come back to life, as she releases her aching clench on the cement lip to nervously wipe the grit from her palm onto her shorts before reaching for Louis, hands moving to clumsily maul down the flex of her shoulder, her forearm. Her skin is smooth and faintly sticky under Harry’s digging thumbs, then it’s so, so soft as Harry’s clumsy hands move to cup along either side of her neck, where she can feel Louis’s pulse thundering like hoofbeats, like the rumble of a nearing storm. It’s so exciting that her stomach swoops again, an involuntary groan escaping her lips and getting trapped against the slick heat of Louis’s mouth as Harry slides needy fingers up into her closely shorn hair. It feels so good, so good that it’s _crazy,_ just to touch Louis like this, fumbling and graceless and over her clothes. Every second is new and uncharted and wild in it’s fierceness, and Harry can’t think past the slow, building fury of their kisses, past the flutter of Louis’s jugular under her fingers, quiet and private. So she palms over what she can reach, like her hands are cracked earth and Louis’s a flood, like her whole body is _drinking_ after a summer of being parched.

And Harry’s _always_ want to touch Louis, so this shouldn’t feel like such a revelation, to finally do it. She’s long dreamed of running her fingers through her hair or playfully snapping the strap of her bra against her shoulder like she would do to any other of her friends, but all this time, she’s held back. Worrying that she might be too much, that she could ruin whatever tension she felt pulled taut between them. If she _had,_ though, maybe this would have happened sooner, maybe something would have snapped. Maybe she would have figured this _out_ sooner. 

Dizzy and hot-cheeked, she pulls away to breathe, Louis’s breath wild and ruined against her lips, coming out in gales. “Is this okay?” she asks, thumbing over the corner of Harry’s mouth, leaving the lingering taste of salt there as Harry chases the touch mindlessly with her tongue. “I didn’t...I wasn’t sure you—“

“I don’t want to stop,” is what Harry manages to get out, her biggest truth. She just wants Louis’s lips, wants her close enough to touch her and be touched, wants to stay drunk on her breath, her taste. She wants to keep kissing because nothing has ever felt better, but also because she doesn’t feel ready to think about it, and she can’t _really_ think when Louis’s lips are so soft and tender, so _giving,_ like she’s checking in with every kiss. 

Louis nods, eyes dark and glittering all at once as they skate over Harry’s panting mouth, and then she’s leaning back in again, her movements slow and serious, tongue sweeping over her own lips before she presses them to Harry’s, and the world disappears. Gives way to dark, endless slickness. 

It’s _magic,_ and Harry has never felt anything like it before. She’s let boys kiss her a few times, even _make out_ with her and try to get up under her shirt, but it has never felt _anything_ close to how this feels. In the past, she would have been half-panicking if not completely bored by now, she was _always_ just waiting for it to be over, pretending that she was somewhere else, going through the motions because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager and so and so likes you and he’s popular and it means that it wouldn’t be bad for your reputation to go on a few dates. Harry never really got what the _fuss_ was about kissing, though, but this, _this_ is so _different._ Her stomach is knotted and her thighs keep pressing together and she feels molten and lava-hot inside. And she’s nervous, yes, but she also feels so _comfortable_ ,which is new. She’s crawling out of her skin, but only because she’d rather be in Louis’s, _not_ because she hates being touched or that this would end. It’s revelation after revelation, and she doesn’t know what this means about her, she just knows that she _doesn’t_ want to stop. She wants more, she wants it all. 

Louis’s still kissing her slowly, even as she’s kissing her _deeply,_ holding her head angled just how she wants it and licking into Harry’s mouth, holding her close with one elbow hooked around her neck, the other hand grazing gently all over Harry’s body. Up her ribs, into her curls, down to the swell of her hip. Her touch is sure and firm at the same time as it’s fleeting, and Harry keeps pressing herself into the heat of Louis’s palm, seeking heat and needing more, so she _shouldn’t_ be shocked when Louis carefully, carefully smooths up Harry’s side, pausing before tentatively thumbing up the outer curve of her breast. 

It feels electric, and Harry’s nipples harden in her bikini under her shirt, breath coming out in a choked gasp. Louis’s hand stops as she pulls away from their kiss enough to ask, “Can I touch you here?” voice so low that it’s more of a scrape than anything else, hitting Harry so _dark,_ so deep in her gut. She’s too breathless to answer in time, so Louis adds, “If that’s too much or too weird, s’okay. I just—”

“No, no...you can...I want you to...sorry, this is just so new, m’still catching up,” Harry stammers uselessly. 

“We don't have to, then...we can just kiss. M’so happy you’re letting me kiss you, Harry,” Louis breathes, stealing a few wet, lingering pecks that make Harry white out in trembling overwhelm. 

“I _want_ you to,” Harry repeats, feeling bold and dizzy, taking Louis’s hand carefully in her own and pushing it up to where it was. “Feels nice.” 

Louis nods weakly, throat clicking as she swallows and dips in for more kisses, slick and hungry and new in their desperation. It’s a lot, the night sky and so many stars exploding between them. Harry shivers as Louis touches her, tentatively at first, just palming her through her shirt before she pushes up under it, fingertips teasing around the triangle of her yellow bikini, which still fits pretty tightly since it hasn’t been exposed to _any_ chlorine this summer, nothing at all to break it in, stretch it out. “Oh, god,” Louis moans, biting Harry’s lower lip, making her whine. “You feel so perfect. God...can’t believe this is happening.” 

Harry can’t either, feeling like she’s _ascending_ as Louis squeezes her gently, thumbs over her hard nipple through the fabric, the nerviest, sharpest throb of pleasure that she’s ever felt without touching herself between her legs. “Oh,” she gasps, legs tightening, pressing together. “Wow.” 

“Good?” Louis asks, playing with her nipple through the fabric, hand shifting beneath her shirt, private and dirty like this sort of stuff is _supposed_ to feel, exciting, secret, thrilling. Harry thought she was missing out, that she just didn’t _get_ it, but Louis changes everything. Louis unlocks her, explains everything with her touch, with her lips. 

“Yes,” Harry tells her, licking messily at Louis’s gasping mouth, totally beyond trying to slow down. “I’m so...m’glad you want to do this with me. I’ve never felt this way before, like, so _good_ when someone touched me? I’ve never...I don’t know,” she babbles nonsensically, and Louis silences her, kisses her hard and deep before pulling away with a ragged inhalation. 

“Of course I want to, Harry. Since the second you stumbled out of this fancy house with a _kitchen knife_ , I’ve wanted to do this to you, with you. You’re…you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” she mumbles, smile so sharp, so kissable as Harry mouths over her jaw, moving on instinct, on want. Her insides clench up at the word _beautiful,_ never has anyone called her that…foxy a few times, cute a few more, but beautiful feels _huge,_ just like this experience feels huge, growing so vast that it erases everything in the past. “Why do you think I come to your house every day? Why do you think I want to teach you how to skate?” she asks, cupping Harry’s cheek with her free hand, thumbing into her blush. 

“I think you’re beautiful, too” Harry confesses quietly, heart stopping as soon as it leaves her mouth, such an impossible, glorious thing to admit. Louis’s hand twitches as it covers her heartbeat before she tenderly pushes two fingers under the elastic of Harry’s bikini, breath shuddering out of her. 

“I want…I’d really like see you,” Louis whispers, carefully and slowly as she gently pushes Harry down, maneuvers her so that she’s lying on her back on the cement, one leg propped up with the knee bent, the other still hanging lazily off the edge of the pool. Harry feels raw and vulnerable under the moonlight, and she _wants_ it, _wants_ the way that Louis’s looking at her, wants her wide, hungry dark eyes backlit in sunset and stars. Harry pulls her shirt over her head and wiggles out of it, not even caring that she’s scraping her back up against the pavement, just _needing_ Louis’s burning gaze on her, the soft, open-wet slick of her mouth as she pants. Using her t-shirt to pillow her head against the concrete, Harry arches up to untie her bikini in the back, letting the cups remain loose and askew on top of her chest, her cheeks burning. 

“You can see,” she says, heat continuing to build hot and low inside her. This feels like the filthiest thing that she's ever done, but at the same time, the purest. After all, it isn’t the first time that she’s been half-naked in front of a girl. Her history is littered with instances of her and Nyla and Lee-Anne comparing chests, prodding at each other, teasing and giggling. She’s always thought that her boobs aren’t very good because her friends’ boobs are big and perfect and shaped like a centerfold’s, standing out from their chests all firm and perky while Harry’s are soft, sagging down even though she’s only a teenager. And judgment from another girl is almost worse than that of a boy; Harry’s been taught that boys are happy to touch _any_ boob, but girls are their own worst critics, catty and mean about each other, about _themselves._ As Louis gently pushes her untied bikini up around her neck, Harry’s _terrified,_ but at the same time, she _knows_ that Louis isn’t like that, that she would _never_ take her this far only to criticize her body. Still, her breath is coming out fast and shallow as her skin is exposed to the night, her nipples tightening up. 

“Wow, Harry,” Louis marvels, fingers skating over Harry’s curves, pushing her breasts together as they fall to the side because gravity is real and she’s lying on her back. But Louis doesn’t _care_ how weird and spread out she might look, she just presses her burning face into the soft, delicate flesh for a moment before wrenching away and gasping, “You’re so…I can’t even talk. You’re perfect and…and I feel like I’m dreaming.” 

Harry pets Louis’s hair, running her fingers through it again and again, chest heaving in overwhelm. “Louis,” she croaks out, because she doesn’t know what else to _say,_ how else she can express the wild storm of feeling choking up through her throat, filling her mouth so that when they kiss, everything’s wet, flooded. “You can touch,” Harry reminds her, dragging her hand up, _making_ her touch her, smoothing Louis’s palm up the curve of her breast, hips shifting on the pavement. 

Whimpering as they kiss, Louis _does._ She’s gentle but certain, thumbing at Harry’s nipples so that they’re sensitive and hard, tugging them between thumb and forefinger and rolling them before covering the whole soft swell with her palm. “Fuck,” she groans at some point, squeezing and gasping, breath huffing out as Harry cranes her neck up to swallow her lips greedily, mind more than half-gone. “I should…s’getting dark. We should go in,” she stutters as she kisses messily up Harry’s throat, and it takes Harry a few seconds to process that, really, because she's forgotten where she is, what time it is. 

“Yeah...yeah, okay. There’s that wine,” Harry says, hips rolling as Louis’s mouth opens on her pulse, slick and shocking, every second something new, something unfathomable. _Oh_ , she thinks for the hundredth time. _Oh, this. It was this all along._

It takes them a few tries, but eventually they get on their feet, towering and giggling and frayed at the edges, and really it’s _amazing_ that Harry isn’t drunk, that they haven’t even fished the corkscrew out of the bottom drawer. Harry laughs breathlessly and holds her wadded up shirt to her chest, padding after Louis who leads the way even though it isn’t her house, tipping left before she stumbles right, spots of color on her cheeks. The stars multiply, exploding behind them somehow, like fireworks flooding the horizon, and Louis heaves open the sliding glass door and beckons with those delicate, magical hands. “‘C’mon,” she whispers, pulling Harry close, opening her mouth along the thrum of her throat like a monsoon. “Let me feel you.” 

And Harry trips into the light of the kitchen, tingling all over while her smile aches, too wide and massive for a single body. _An incurable believer in the magic of the midnight sky, and the love that I found today_ , she thinks giddily, spinning as Louis wraps her arms around her waist, the answer to every question she didn’t know she had, the sudden light in so many blackened tunnels. 

 

 _Like a vision of darkness,_ she thinks as Louis kisses the back of her neck and fumbles with the foil wrapper, fingers clumsy on the neck of the bottle, Louis’s hands so, so deft and soft and distracting as they touch her, from her sternum to her throat, following every breath. _Of a thousand lonely nights._

They pour glasses and tumble onto the couch, and Harry doesn’t bother to put her shirt on again. 

—-

They kiss and kiss and kiss some more, Louis eventually mouthing down Harry’s neck to suck a stinging mark into her sternum before she stops herself, shaking her head. _I want too many things,_ she says mysteriously, thumbing at Harry’s nipples longingly, like Harry doesn't want the same things, even if she doesn’t have names for them yet. Harry tells her that she’s right here, that she’s in it, whatever this is, but Louis just kisses her and says, _let’s wait until you know how to ask for what you want, yeah?_ and Harry can’t argue with that, as more and more words get stolen from her, drowned out hot and sticky into filaments before they disappear, Louis replacing languages, altering syllables into pure heat. 

At some point in the night, once they’ve slowed down because wine makes Harry sleepy, she asks Louis, _“_ Have you ever done this before? With other girls?” Her fingers are drumming anxiously on Louis's collarbones, golden and lovely, her kisses dark and bittersweet with Shiraz. 

Louis shakes her head, tucking a curl behind Harry’s ear and kissing her temple with stained, swollen lips. “No, not like this, exactly. When I was fifteen, there was a girl…m’friend’s older sister. She smoked and was from New York...she taught me some things, would kiss me when she got drunk, show me how to get her off,” Louis explains, and Harry’s stomach coils in dual heat and jealousy, even though this was presumably before they met, certainly before she knew what any of this _meant._ “But not, like…with a girl my age, a girl I liked. Been too scared to even think about trying it, really,” Louis tacks on. “But I couldn’t stop with you. You make me crazy.” 

Their legs are twined, and Harry shifts closer, grinding subtly against Louis’s thighs like a secret. Louis refuses to let them do anything beyond touching each other above the waist, though, _wanna wait a bit, want to know that you’re in this for real_ , she keeps saying when Harry’s hands creep under her shirt curiously, making Harry suspect that she's been hurt before. Which is why she’s asking questions even if the answers sting. She just wants to _know Louis,_ know her inside and out. 

“But you’ve liked…other girls. This isn’t, like, the first time you’ve ever thought about it or anything?” she asks, playing with Louis’s soft, short hair, fingers razing all over her scalp because it's impossible not to touch now that she knows that she can. Louis cough-laughs like she’s shocked, and Harry feels younger than she is. 

“I’ve liked girls since I was, like, five. I liked my best friend in preschool,” Louis shrugs, like it isn’t a big deal, like she got over it a long time ago. “I’ve always known.” 

“Oh,” Harry says, licking her lips, impressed and intimidated. “I didn’t. _Know,_ I mean. Like…I knew there were _lesbians,_ living in San Francisco or in the woods or wherever, farming and hating men,” she offers, realizing how absurd it sounds as it comes out of her mouth, like the second you’re a girl who realizes that she likes other girls, you’re supposed to ship off to the City or wherever and join a commune. “But I figured that just wasn’t me. Like, I thought...girls just…made me nervous or something? You...you made me _so_ nervous,” she stammers, voice cracking, heart rabbiting. “I didn’t know why.” 

Louis’s face gets soft, her eyes crinkling at the corners before she leans in and kisses Harry, sweet and slow and hot. Then she pulls away and asks in the lowest, prettiest whisper, “Do you know, now? Are you scared?” 

And Harry shakes her head, licking Louis’s spit from her lips, settling more closely into her arms. It should be scary, and all new things are, in some ways, but more than anything, it feels like coming home. Like the most natural place that she could have ended up. “I don’t…s’hard to _know_ anything,” she settles on, thumbing the indent behind Louis’s ear, marveling at every little part of her. “But I know that I like you. And that I want to keep kissing and touching you, for as long as we can get away with it,” she explains, loving the way that Louis’s smile gets wider, the way that her body softens into Harry, fitting all her vacancies. “And I’m not scared,” she adds, because she _isn’t._ Open doors and unlocked chests are nothing to be afraid of, even if you didn't know that things were closed, even if you didn’t realize that you were locked up. 

Louis lets out a long, trembling exhale, and Harry catches it in a kiss. It turns long and languid, alcohol-slicked and sticky-warm, and Harry’s _dizzy_ from it,feels like she hasn’t been anything less than dizzy since Louis climbed over her wall and ended up in the backyard like an antidote to June Gloom, the cure to her summer boredom.

When they part, they’re breathless, Louis giggling almost nervously, her exhalations mingling with Harry’s and tickling against her lips. Harry has forgotten what they’re talking about, so she’s lost for a moment when Louis says, “M’so glad you aren’t afraid…I sort of thought…I dunno. I’d convinced myself that after tonight, you’d have a freak out and never want to see me again. I’m glad we’re talking about it instead.” 

Harry shakes her head, and the room with all the fancy white carpet and the glass-topped coffee table littered in _Better Homes & Gardens_ magazines spins around her in a whirlpool. “No, no,” she assures Louis, cupping her face, hands looking big and clumsy against such delicate cheekbones. “I’m… surprised, maybe. Figuring things out. But not scared, not gonna freak out,” she promises with certainty, bending in to kiss the dark sweep of Louis’s lashes against her flushed skin. “Actually, it’s like…all this stuff suddenly making sense. All summer…I’ve been obsessed with you, Louis. Couldn’t think about anything else. I still worry about how m’gonna dress before you show up, what I’m gonna say to you when you talk to me. Isn’t that ridiculous?” she scoffs, but Louis’s looking at her with wide eyes, like she’s moved. 

“I do, too,” she admits, shaking her head. “Ask Zayn…he knows. Has been telling me for weeks to get in and make my move before you found someone else to take you out. You’re such a _fox,_ Harry, can’t believe you don’t have ten boyfriends already. I feel so lucky that you’re here with me.” 

“I don't like boys, I think,” Harry says slowly, marveling at how simultaneously strange and comforting those words feel falling from her lips and hitting the air, unspoken suspicions becoming truths. Something that she’s always known in her soul of souls, touching the outside world. “It’s funny, I used to think that something was wrong with me? But maybe I wasn’t broken this whole time. I was just like _this,”_ she continues, still too shy and uncertain for a label, for a word. 

“You aren’t broken,” Louis murmurs, kissing her temple, her forehead, her brow. And somehow, it helps. Her words and her kisses, smoothing something in Harry that’s still bunched tight and uncertain. “You’re perfect just like this.” 

And Harry lets Louis kiss it into her, one hundred impressions of the same brilliant words, sun-bright and wine-stained. The summer’s waiting, the moon’s shining, and Harry has months left to figure out what any of this means, so she lets Louis kiss her, lets Louis press fingerprints into her pulse, lets Louis twirl her curls around her fingers, lets Louis sing to her, and this time, she doesn't want it to end.


End file.
